Densho Digital Archive - Henry Shimizu Interview (denshovh-shenry-01-0011)

<Begin Segment 11>

TI: So let's talk about your mother. What was she like?

HS: My mother was about twenty years younger than my father.

TI: And her name is, was Kimiko?

HS: Kimiko. And she, when she came from Japan, she was in her early twenties. I think she was, well, she got married in '23, and she died in '97. She was ninety years old.

TI: So born 1907?

HS: '7, yeah, 1907, so that would be...

TI: She came in 1923?

HS: So she might have been eighteen or nineteen at the time, when she...

TI: Yeah, it's like even seventeen.

HS: Seventeen, maybe. I forgot how old she was, but she was relatively young when she, she was about twenty years younger than my father, 'cause when... my father died at ninety-five, and that was in '82. And my mother was, died in '90, so that was another eighteen years later, so she was ninety, so she would have been twenty, twenty-one years younger, over twenty years younger. And she came to Prince Rupert, and she was, like I say, at the time when she arrived, she was fairly young. And I came along in 1928, and I was the first-born, so she'd been in Canada for a few years before had her first child, she had her first child. And then we, then we had the, she became pregnant again soon after, and we went back to Japan with her to have her second child. So she actually had my, my sister was actually born in Japan. I was born in Canada, I went back with her as a two-year-old.

TI: Now, do you know why your mother went back to have...

HS: Oh, I think she was homesick. She said that herself, she wanted to go home, and she wanted to have her second, she wanted to have, she was homesick for her mother, so she went, well, she was fairly young, of course, like I said before. Twenty-three, yeah, she would be still in her early twenties by then. And she went home, and she went back to Japan, and she had her second child. And we stayed there for, oh, over a year. And Papa was, used to, continued to work and send, send money back. And eventually, her mother said, "You know, you have to go back to Canada because your father is very faithful to you, sending you money every month and everything. He's put up his, he's doing his part, so you have to do your part." And she, her mother convinced her to come back to Canada. And so by the time we came back to Canada, my sister was a little over one year old, I think. So we were there for about two years, three years, two or three years. 'Cause by the time I came back, I was, I went back, I was almost five, I was four and something. So we were at least two and a half, two years in Japan, came back to Canada, and then of course, we stayed.

TI: So describe your mother. What was she like, her personality?

HS: Oh, personality, my mother was very, she was well-educated. Much better-educated than my father from that point of view. She got her education from the fact that when she was in, her family became Anglicans in Japan, and they sent her to an Anglican secretarial school, in fact, or a, it was kind of a little college type thing. So she, she actually got a good education, finished her education before she got married. And she was, like I say, educated by the Anglican church, so when she came to Prince Rupert, there was an Anglican mission there that was sort of two, there were two spinsters, two elderly Caucasian ladies who were, could speak Japanese, and they sort of took upon themselves to organize the Japanese people in Prince Rupert (...) and the area around. And they were, they were a very good source of information for the Japanese people, and to assimilate into the, into the Canadian way of doing things. 'Cause when my mother arrived, she could speak no English, whereas she got, her English was from Miss Lange and her assistant, plus they would teach them all kinds of things like how to eat with knives and forks, things of this nature. That's what they taught the, the Japanese girls, who were coming directly from Japan, (...) they had to learn to speak English, they had to learn how to conduct themselves in Canada, 'cause it was completely foreign to them. And these two ladies sort of became their kind of conduit into the, into the Canadian society.

TI: Now, were there other things that did similar things besides the Anglican church? Where there, like, other churches that did similar things, or was that kind of the main one?

HS: No, that was the main one. I think there might have been a United Church, but I didn't have any, I'm not even sure that they were involved very much with the...